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Espressive Barista vs N-able MSP Manager comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 3, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Automation Anywhere
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
661
Ranking in other categories
Business Process Management (BPM) (2nd), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) (2nd), Process Mining (1st), Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) (1st), Agentic Automation (1st), Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies (2nd), AI Legal & Compliance (1st), AI Finance & Accounting (1st), AI Procurement & Supply Chain (1st)
Espressive Barista
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
Help Desk Software (38th), AI-Powered Chatbots (9th), AI-Agents for HR (2nd)
N-able MSP Manager
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
Help Desk Software (24th), IT Service Management (ITSM) (22nd)
 

Featured Reviews

Venkat Sivaprakash - PeerSpot reviewer
Management Consultant at Accenture
Has significantly improved document-driven workflows and reduced processing time across finance and HR functions
Automation Anywhere has evolved significantly and upgraded itself to provide agentic AI and AI-based automation solutions for document automation. The product has matured considerably over time. We can create workflows that can call an API. We can include prompts in particular workflows for ChatGPT-related functions, connecting to an LLM and RAG to perform tasks. For document automation, modern features are available to train documents, ensuring high accuracy and repeatability over time. The system is very easy to use. I recently completed a course in document automation, typically designed for people involved in coding and technical aspects. Though I understand coding comprehensively, I don't do actual coding. The course was very accessible. Currently, extensive coding isn't necessary due to the hybrid model incorporating GenAI aspects, low-code, no-code capabilities, APIs, and numerous pre-built objects in Automation Anywhere. The features include GenAI-driven prompting methods and workflow creation capabilities. In these workflows, we can create decision boxes and call APIs without coding. We simply pull objects, drop them, connect them, and add minimal coding when needed. The most crucial aspect isn't coding but rather sizing the automation and fleshing out the details. Automation Co-pilot takes notes and performs automated analysis. It can extract details from videos, summarize conversations, and provide detailed information. During calls, it identifies instructions and performs tasks such as preparing reports and reconciliation. Automation Anywhere can also connect with Microsoft Co-pilot. Through Co-pilot, real-time operations can be executed, allowing direct interaction between vendors and automation through this component.
Jim Lobao - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager for End User Support Services at Five9
Has helped enhance our support ability, reduced our resolution time, and reduced our service desk costs
Espressive Barista's natural language processing and conventional AI still have room for improvement. We haven't yet found anything that resembles true AI that can learn autonomously without human intervention. However, Barista does help us identify and address some of these areas, allowing my team to step in and create intents and responses to questions. When a user asks a question that Barista doesn't immediately understand, we can recognize the pattern, capture it, and link it to a common intent. This is highly beneficial for acquiring such data, but it's a reactive approach and still requires curation. Natural language processing still has some way to go. One of our challenges is that our internal employees haven't yet adopted a natural way of interacting with Barista. Getting people to be concise and to the point, rather than being verbose as if they were interacting with a human, has been an ongoing challenge. While they may feel comfortable being conversational in Slack, expecting a human-like response, Barista is a different entity. Barista isn't interested in their recent vacation; it just wants to know they're locked out of their account. So, some users may assume Barista understands their intent when they say, "I'm back from vacation and locked out of my account." Barista, however, may interpret this as a request for the holiday schedule. Therefore, we're gradually educating our users to adapt their communication style for better success with Barista. Conversely, we desire Barista to adapt its behavior based on the interaction, the language used, and the way people communicate. I wholeheartedly desire an AI that can continuously learn and adapt to our organization's evolving needs. This is the most challenging aspect, as it involves understanding our organization's terminology, procedures, and toolsets. We've made significant progress in this area. However, from an NLP standpoint, we still face challenges with our nearly 3,000 Slack channel users, each with their unique communication styles. People ask questions in various ways, and sometimes there are misunderstandings. They want to interact with us naturally. However, we still struggle with natural language processing. People don't always realize that the bot is a virtual agent designed to be concise and efficient. Sometimes, less is more. It's been a difficult transition for people to grasp that they're conversing with a virtual agent, not a human. They still expect human-like interactions, such as discussing their weekend or holidays or simply pasting screenshots of errors. However, the bot can't interpret screenshots. If they provide the error code and some context about the application, the bot can better understand the issue. So, the key challenge is bridging the gap between human expectations and the bot's capabilities in terms of natural interaction.
GK
CTO at InTTrust SA
Ticketing has helped prioritize support tasks while contract and project management have required better integration and pricing flexibility
I don't know if N-able MSP Manager could have some additional features in the future to make it more competitive because it might already be available and I'm not aware of it.I cannot say that N-able MSP Manager dashboard is intuitive, but I don't see any big difference with ManageEngine. From the deployment perspective with N-able MSP Manager, I cannot have higher expectations because it is a SaaS solution, so it was deployed as is from the technical perspective. From the business perspective, the deployment is complex, but I cannot tell you that it is less complex than ManageEngine. The main reason that made me change my mind and proceed with ManageEngine is the availability of add-ons in combination with their pricing.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Automation Anywhere has improved my organization by automating many rule-based and nonjudgmental processes in domains like telecommunications, human resources, financial services, and daily or monthly reporting."
"Automation Anywhere is one of the most popular RPA vendors offering powerful and user-friendly RPA capabilities to automate the business processes that are performed by humans. AA is a web-based management system that includes a control to run end-to-end automated business tasks for companies."
"Automation Co-Pilot helped increase productivity."
"We offer them a cost and time-effective solution for repeated and time-consuming processes, which surely help a lot in terms of improving quality."
"My impression of the Bot Store is good. It is a really smart offering. A lot of the time customers need the same things, and there's not necessarily a lot of logic in reinventing the wheel. When you take the Bot Store, you allow people to share knowledge, you allow best practices to be immediately adopted by users, and you can share good knowledge, saving a lot of time for customers. It's a really good thing."
"AA improves process consistency and reduces human error."
"Our business has seen a good return on investment with Automation Anywhere, and they are so pleased that they are requesting to add more processes."
"The scalability is good."
"Its ability to recognize phrases has gotten smarter over time."
"Given Barista's out-of-the-box content for common industry applications, the value is pretty good right from day one."
"Our developers have used the Barista Control Center to extend the platform by adding content, and they've found it fairly easy to do and manage"
"The solution is available to support us instantly as required."
"Given the out of the box content for common industry applications, we got good value out of the solution right from day one."
"The most valuable feature is its scalability."
"We have the ability to alter phrases, create new phrases, or enhance phrases, or change paths. From the dashboard, we are able to get a lot of information we need about what people are asking, where they are dropping off from conversations, and where they do not get the information they need."
"With respect to its natural language processing capabilities, it recognizes things that you wouldn't think it would recognize. Even in cases where it doesn't, it's pretty easy to go in and make the adjustments that are needed."
"This is a premier product and it has been around for a long time."
"We are an MSP, and for what we do, we have one centralized dashboard, and even though we're a small IT team, we can manage a ton of clients with a lot of automated processes, even for patch management."
"Don't get scared of the price tag because it's definitely worth it."
"I like that you can do all the things with it. You can patch, and you can run the scheduled tasks. You can remote in, upload files, and download files. You can log onto a computer PowerShell, or command prompt, without having to log into RDP. I also like its ease of use."
"I am impressed with the tool's integration with our mail system."
"The best advantage for us, since we use all N-able products, is that the MSP portal centralizes everything."
"At a significantly lower price, I managed to get project management modules, contract management, and CMDB, which were not all available in N-able MSP Manager."
 

Cons

"The setup is complex because there is a lot of customization."
"Automation Anywhere has some limitation with its integrations."
"I would like to see a lot around API integration going forward, like the ability for other systems to talk to the AI better by opening it up. I would like to see more chatbots or anything in the journey of making it truly immersive for human workers working with these bots."
"There is definitely some room for improvement there. It is sort of a hit and miss with their support engineers, you have some really good ones and some that aren't."
"It is good for standard procedures with an SOP. For those, it works well. But there are processes that are tricky and need human intervention and intelligence. In those cases, the process gets stuck."
"One way Automation Anywhere can be improved is in ticketing; I have a couple of tickets that have been outstanding for a while, and the support staff have closed tickets without checking with me first, which has been a sore spot."
"Excel automation or the activities for Excel is an area of improvement."
"Replacing the list of search options with voice commands for each item would be great."
"The reports provided by the solution are not customizable."
"I would like to see the continued expansion of all of the automation capabilities."
"Although they've done some work on their metrics dashboard, there is some fine-tuning to do for people that just want to go in there at a glance and see their metrics."
"My only comment would be if they wanted to use this as an IT service management tool, maybe they could think about Barista making tickets and having change management and problem management capabilities."
"There aren't very many things that this product needs improvement on."
"The knowledge management could definitely be improved."
"I would like to see improvement to the out-of-the-box verbiage, with the questions going to the right place."
"Expressive Barista could improve by adding native integration with WhatsApp, one of the top communication channels in South Africa. When we're trying to sell Barista to customers, we have to tell them that the solution doesn't have out-of-the-box support for WhatsApp. We can develop it, but then we need to have a conversation about how much that will cost."
"Its reporting is lousy and bad. It is not as good as it should be. There is too much work involved to get what you want. Most times, you have to call them to customize some stuff. I just don't like that part. They need to work on their reporting. They have a way to go."
"Comparing the pricing of N-able MSP Manager to ManageEngine, it is a little bit too high."
"Its reporting is lousy and bad. It is not as good as it should be."
"I'd like to see a way to import contacts in bulk using an Excel sheet or another import method."
"The tool needs to improve its customization of the user interface."
"There are too many products out there. What I would like to see is a simplified solution that is packaged better, where you can easily implement or turn on the functionality that you need."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I believe it is $10,000 for Bot Creator."
"I would rate the cost of Automation Anywhere as a six out of ten, with ten being the most expensive."
"We're just starting to renew our license, and we were quoted $115,000 without the IQ Bot. The IQ Bot is another $30,000. This is with very limited pages, as we go through our first projects. The majority of the cost was for ten days of onsite training."
"It's a bit expensive compared to other RPA tools on the market."
"Regarding the price, licensing, and maintenance, Automation Anywhere provides its customers with its best and affordable value."
"The licensing cost of Automation Anywhere is better than UiPath and Blue Prism."
"Although the initial implementation cost of Automation Anywhere is relatively high compared to other options, its annual subscription cost is lower than UiPath's, which has the opposite pricing structure."
"In terms of pricing, this is a good product."
"User-based licensing has been working well for us, and we believe we are deriving significant value from it."
"It is expensive. It's not a cheap thing."
"The pricing isn't overly burdensome. It's going to be interesting to see how new models come in with new capabilities but, as it is, as a base system, it's pretty good."
"The solution is affordable."
"The price for the licensing is fair."
"I would rate the tool's pricing an eight out of ten since it's not the cheapest one in the market."
"Don't get scared of the price tag because it's definitely worth it."
"I don't know the exact cost, but I know it's reasonable. Its cost of entry is not bad. I've had other organizations sign up for it. I don't know how much they paid, but it wasn't bad. You charge for every object. You charge for AV, and you charge for servers. There is a charge for everything or every object in that. I know we make money from it, but I don't know what it is."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Construction Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
15%
Construction Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Healthcare Company
8%
Construction Company
18%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Media Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business157
Midsize Enterprise83
Large Enterprise553
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Large Enterprise6
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
It depends on your use case. Is it simply to automate a couple of processes? Is it to augment a human team? AA is ver...
How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
From my experience using AA tool, it depends on the applications that you want to automate, because there some applic...
How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
It is a highly preferred RPA tool. You can check my Automation Anywhere Review to know more.
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What needs improvement with N-able MSP Manager?
I don't know if N-able MSP Manager could have some additional features in the future to make it more competitive beca...
What is your primary use case for N-able MSP Manager?
I am deploying it for my company.I inherited an implementation with N-able MSP Manager that was not quite good. I fac...
What advice do you have for others considering N-able MSP Manager?
I use N-able MSP Manager ticketing system.It has helped to prioritize tasks. At the level that I am aware of the prod...
 

Also Known As

Automation Anywhere, Testing Anywhere, Automation Anywhere Enterprise, Agentic Process Automation System (Now Certified for WorkSpaces)
No data available
SolarWinds LOGICnow, SolarWinds MSP Manager
 

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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Google, Linkedin, Cisco, Juniper Networks, DellEMC, Comcast, Mastercard, Quest Diagnostics
Information Not Available
Longleaf Systems, ITproMedia, Choice Technology, Halski Systems, Allixo Technologies, Nettech, Concept Technology
Find out what your peers are saying about Espressive Barista vs. N-able MSP Manager and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
902,988 professionals have used our research since 2012.